“Okay,” I said, sitting down in my living room, peering into Marcell’s eyes. “Now we can build.” In that moment, I couldn’t help but think that this was how my mother must have felt when she got her first apartment when I was a young girl.
Build is what I did. With a safe place to stay, a car, and a job, I could work on my purpose: to become a big-time, paid, SAG-card-carrying actress in the city where stars are made. My manager from back home, Linda Townsend, put me in touch with an agency whose sole direction was to get me the gigs I needed to score that SAG card. I needed to book three roles as an extra, plus pay the $1,100 fee to join the union. Two of those extra roles came at my cousin’s job on Minor Adjustments. It was a relatively easy gig—nothing like the non-SAG hustle I had to pull on Malcolm X—because my cousin took good care of me, letting me chill in his dressing room and eat with him and his mom. The third role came when I worked as an extra on 3rd Rock From the Sun, a sitcom on which my DC homegirl Simbi Khali was working. Simbi, an alum of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, was an inspiration because she, too, had left DC and was doing exactly what I wanted to do: making it in Hollywood. Every time I was around Simbi, she would talk about the process—what it took to secure roles, how to hone my craft, what events I should be sure to attend, the people I needed to know—and I absorbed it like a sponge. I’m grateful to her for that.
With her help, I became SAG eligible. And every time I would book a job after that, I would chip away at that union fee until finally it was official: I was a card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild. I was on my way to my blessing—exactly what God intended for me, and everything I’d hustled practically all my life to be: a working actress. This single mother was on a mission not only to make that dream a reality, but also to be the finest example of a success story for my son—to let him know that when I whispered in his ear, “You can be anything, baby,” I wasn’t bullshitting. This, my story, is proof positive of that.
8
Raising a Black Boy
My mother swears all the singing and dancing I did at Howard University when I was pregnant with Marcell made my baby push his way into this world with a heart full of joy. I can’t say I disagree with her. Marcell was the cutest, jolliest baby ever. He never cried, was never sick, and was always laughing—a bundle of dimples and giggles with the pull of a magnet. My study group would show up to my apartment to go over lessons and scenes together and they’d barely say hello to me at my front door before they rushed in looking for my Marcell. There he’d be, tucked in his crib with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme floating from my boom box’s speakers, staring up at the gaggle of smiling faces cooing his way; he’d stick out his tongue, wave his little arms and legs in the air, and flash that mouthful of gums, and my classmates’ hearts would do Alvin Ailey–worthy leaps across the room. The same was true when I’d take Marcell’s little hand in mine and walk with him through the mall or the grocery store. There he’d be, this sweet, bubbly little three-year-old, toddling by my side; he’d barely keep time with my stride as we tried to get some shopping done, only to be stopped every ten feet or so to let a crowd of strangers ooh and ah over my adorable baby. He was a rock star, my kid. The whole world loves a sweet little chubby brown boy.
Until they don’t. When they get some length on those legs and those baby curls morph into a mass of naps, suddenly everything is new. Where once admirers saw cuteness, there is only threatening stereotype, and all that brightness that made those adorable little black boys irresistible is overshadowed by the dark cloud of assumptions, disdain, and, yes, racism. This is neither speculation nor conjecture from an overly sensitive mom; it is verifiable, indisputable fact. Just a few years ago, headlines blared with news of three different studies that showed that black boys as young as ten are mistaken as more than four years older, are more likely to face police violence if accused of a crime, and are often denied the assumption of innocence typically afforded children when they act like, well, children. It is how Tamir Rice, a baby-faced twelve-year-old kid playing shoot-’em-up games with a toy gun, can get gunned down by police within literally seconds of their arriving on the scene, with the shooting officer saying he thought the boy looked like a twenty-year-old. It is how Trayvon Martin’s killer can get away with claiming a skinny kid wearing a hoodie in the rain, with Skittles and iced tea in his pockets, was a threat. It is how a fourteen-year-old Emmett Till could end up at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River, beaten, broken, gouged, and tied with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan, and his killers could not only be acquitted of his murder, but go on to brag about how that child “got what he deserved,” without any legal repercussion. In other words, our babies—our sons—get buried in an avalanche of low expectations, negative perceptions, oft-quoted statistics, and outright danger that denies them their basic humanity. And it is hard as hell, as a mother of a black male, to stand there with your baby in your arms, watching the clouds form and the sky turn gray—hearing that rumbling thunder, knowing that an immense, intense, never-ending storm of criticism, judgment, and outright abuse is about to rain down on your son’s head.
For Marcell, it began as early as kindergarten, before he’d barely opened his first pack of crayons—before, even, he could write his own name. It happened right after school, when the sun is high and the kids are restless from a long day’s work and the teacher opens the door and shoos her young charges outside to let off a little steam before pickup. From what I gathered from the story, a few kids from his class were jumping around, plotting out a game of hide-and-seek, when Marcell tried to join in on the fun. “Can I play?” he asked.
One of his classmates was quick to answer: “No,” he said, without even a moment of hesitation.
“Why?” Marcell asked.